A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II

by Adam Makos

  Franz had entered the Alps near Hallein, Austria, several days earlier and driven until he found a lodge where other wayward soldiers had congregated. Franz had joined them and lived off his canned food while waiting. On May 1, he and the others crowded around a radio that announced the news they had long expected: Hitler was dead. He had shot himself in his bunker. A day later, Germany’s forces began surrendering, first in Berlin then in Italy, and finally, on May 4, in Bavaria. Having decided it was safe to surrender, Franz had left the lodge and steered his kettenkrad back onto the deserted road that led west to Berchtesgaden, where the Americans were rumored to be.

  The kettenkrad sputtered. Its six tracked wheels ground slowly to a halt. Franz turned to the side of the road and stepped out. A glimpse of the gas gauge confirmed he was out of fuel. He lit a cigarette and grabbed his backpack. He pulled his black logbook from the pack and dropped it into the deep thigh pocket of his leather flying pants. The book was a prized possession of his that documented his 487 combat flights. He removed his holstered pistol from his belt and tossed it into the back of the kettenkrad. It could only get him in trouble. Leaving the pistol and empty backpack behind, Franz began walking west in his heavy boots.

  Franz looked for road signs to Berchtesgaden, but someone had torn them down. He chain-smoked. Whenever the pines creaked, he stopped, looked, then resumed his trek. The Party’s propaganda had told him the Americans would be vengeful, and after they had worked a prisoner over they would hand him to the French or Soviets for further punishment. Franz hoped this was not true. After his experience in the desert he would have preferred to be a prisoner of the British. Franz passed through a tiny hamlet of a half dozen homes on either side of the swift-flowing stream. There, along the side of the road, he stopped and looked up. Hanging from a telephone pole was a dead German soldier in a gray Army uniform. Franz looked back the way he had come and thought, Maybe this was not so smart. He shook the idea from his mind. The Americans had not done this. They wanted the Germans to surrender, not to run away and keep fighting.

  Franz continued. A half a mile later, he came to a split in the road. To his right, the concrete road continued through the mountain pass. To his left, a small wooden bridge led across the stream to a dirt logging road. The logging road hugged the mountainside and was dark with shadows. Franz decided to take the logging road because it was more likely to be deserted.

  Franz set out again, his boots now crunching the dirt. Through gaps in the pine trees, he kept his eyes on the bright, flowing stream and the main road beyond the stream, where he expected to see American tanks. Turning a bend, Franz stopped in his tracks. In the path ahead of him stood twenty or more SS soldiers. He instantly recognized them by their camouflage smocks with light green and brown spots. Some were digging in. Others were setting up machine guns over fallen trees and aiming their rifles across the stream toward the main road. A few sat on rocks along the mountainside, smoking and cradling machine pistols. Franz realized they had hung the soldier he had found earlier. It was a message to other Germans to stay away. They had most likely mined the main road and were waiting for the same American tanks Franz had expected to see.

  Now you’ve done it, Franz thought to himself, cursing his decision to take the logging road. Franz resumed his stride toward the SS soldiers. He knew he could not turn back, having discovered their ambush. He hoped he could give the impression of complete disinterest and walk through them like a passerby. He reached his hand into his right pocket and grabbed his rosary. His fingers had long stripped the black paint from the beads, completing their transformation to a pale purple color. As he passed the first soldiers, Franz tried not to look at the silver runes that resembled small lightning bolts on the soldiers’ gray collars. This was the mark of the SS. Some wore soft caps with the death’s head patch above the brim. Others wore helmets with fabric covers that matched their smocks. Some of the SS soldiers snickered and joked at the pilot without a plane.

  Clad in his crumpled gray officer’s cap, cracked leather flight suit, and heavy, muddy boots, Franz looked haggard but tough. Some of the SS soldiers glared as Franz walked between them. Franz stared ahead and trudged along.

  Franz knew the soldiers on either side of him were the toughest and most ruthless in Germany. No pilot of the German Air Force, except for Goering, would ever be convicted of a war crime. The same could not be said of the SS men whom Franz walked past.

  With every step away from them, Franz expected to hear the crack of a rifle and to feel the punch of a bullet in his back. But none came. By some miracle, as if he were invisible, they let him live.

  Several miles later, the logging road merged with the main road. Stepping into the light and onto the concrete, Franz saw a green armored vehicle facing him, its gun leveled on the road. He knew he had reached the outskirts of Berchtesgaden. The vehicle wore a white American star on its hood. Franz raised his arms in surrender.

  THE AMERICAN INFANTRYMEN initially assumed Franz was an SS man posing as a pilot (for more lenient treatment) because of the direction he had come from. They had known that the SS were there the whole time. At first, the GI interrogators were rough, operating under the assumption that Franz was an SS officer. Then they realized otherwise and passed Franz along to interrogators of the Army Air Forces.*

  The Air Forces interrogators recognized Franz immediately, having received JV-44’s surrender at Salzburg Airport and that of Galland at Tegernsee. Over the next fourteen days, Franz submitted to a number of interrogations. The new interrogators immediately took his logbook, and overestimating its technological value, they never returned it. When Franz sat down for his first interrogation, he agreed to tell the American officers about the 262 but with a stipulation: “I still am a soldier, so I can only tell you so much.”

  * * *

  * Franz would remember, “I thought, It’s days before the war is over, why not? He did not have a plane of his own.”

  * Two days later, on May 1, Galland sent a pilot, Major Willi Herget, in a light plane to find American General Eisenhower. In Eisenhower’s absence, General Pearson Menoher met with Herget. Herget delivered Galland’s letter seeking to surrender JV-44. Menoher sent Herget back to tell Galland where to deliver the jets and to offer an 8th Air Force fighter escort. Galland received the message and dispatched Herget back to Menoher to clarify the plan. Herget never made it. American ground forces shot down his plane. He was injured, captured, and all means of communication between Galland and Menoher were lost.

  * Franz would remember, “When they interrogated me, within the first minutes they knew I couldn’t be SS because I showed them my logbook.”

  24

  WHERE BOMBS HAD FALLEN

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, MARCH 1946, STRAUBING, BAVARIA

  THE TOES OF Franz’s flying boots dragged along the rough, upturned stones as the three German police officers hauled him through the streets. Two men carried him, their arms under his. The third man, the officer in charge, walked ahead of the others leading them. Franz’s senses returned. He caught his footing and limped on his own power. But the policemen would not let go. Behind Franz, the men at the brick works poured out into the street, silently watching the drama. The townspeople on both sides of the street looked on Franz with hollow eyes and frowns. They remained silent. The war had made them apathetic to uniformed brutes dragging a man away.

  Franz knew he was in trouble when the officer in charge turned and entered the first dark alley they came to. The policemen pulled Franz into the alley and dropped him in the darkness between two buildings. Franz looked toward the street he had come from, warm with light, and knew he had been safe in the sight of the crowds.

  The police officers were bigger than him. Franz clenched his fists, anticipating a beating. The officers adjusted their collars the way a man might when rolling up his sleeves before a fight. Franz glanced toward the street, contemplating a run. He knew he wouldn’t get far in his heavy boots.

  But then the
policemen took a step back nonchalantly. The officer in charge reached in his pocket and pulled forth a pack of cigarettes. He offered Franz a cigarette. Franz hesitated. The man shook the packet. “It’s all right,” he told him. Franz drew a cigarette. One of the other officers extended his lighter. Franz puffed the cigarette to life; it was an American brand. The other men lit up, too. Everyone shook out his shoulders and seemed to relax. Franz apologized for punching the brick yard manager, explaining that the man was refusing him work because he had been a fighter pilot.

  “Don’t worry,” the officer in charge told Franz. “We’re not going to do anything about it.” The officers went on to explain what the three of them had done in the war.* The officer in charge had led a flak battery. One of his men had been a guard on airfields. The other officer had been in the infantry.

  The officer in charge asked Franz about his unit and where he had fought. Franz told him. The men had all heard of JV-44, “Galland’s unit.” The officer in charge explained that he was from Straubing and had finagled his way to end the war at a battery there. He told Franz with a laugh, “I watched you fly!” He explained that he had once seen 262s, high overhead.

  Franz laughed and said it was possible. The officer in charge glanced at his watch and stamped out his cigarette butt in the gutter. His men did the same.

  With the click of his boots, the officer in charge saluted Franz, holding his salute with his hand pressed to the brim of his cap. His men did the same. The three policemen held their salutes, their eyes locked on Franz. In his threadbare coat and fingerless gloves Franz raised his hand to his brow, clicked together the heavy heels of his flying boots with a thud, and saluted them back.

  The policemen wheeled and walked out of the alley. Stepping into the sun, they turned toward the brickyard to continue their patrol. Franz followed them but turned the other direction, away from the scene of the incident. He walked back the way he had come, toward the sun and along the road where bombs had fallen.

  FOR MONTHS FRANZ scraped by in Straubing, delivering what money he made to his mother and Eva. Finally in 1947, he found work fixing sewing machines at an unlikely place: the Messerchmitt company in Augsburg, near the former jet school at Lechfeld. No longer did the builder of 109s and 262s make fighters. After the war they had transitioned to building knitting looms and personal sewing machines at the same factories.

  In 1948, Franz married Eva. They settled into their new postwar life together. As the years passed, Franz stayed in touch with some of his old comrades, including Roedel. In winter 1953, they met at a pub halfway between their homes and went drinking for the last time. Franz told Roedel that he was leaving soon for Canada, where he had secured the job of a lifetime—to work as an engineer on a new Canadian fighter plane. Roedel tried to talk Franz into staying. He had heard rumors that the German Air Force was soon to be rebuilt. Officers who had served with honor in World War II would be invited back for a chance to lead.*

  Roedel told Franz that if he stayed, they both could join together and continue their careers in the new Air Force. They could fly alongside American and British pilots instead of against them. Roedel had talked to Trautloft and the Count, who were contemplating the opportunity. Roedel said that even Steinhoff, who had survived his burns, was hoping the Allies would let him wear his uniform again. But Franz told Roedel he was done with the notion of following orders. He had seen what “following orders” had done to Germany. Germany had become a land dotted with strange new hills. The hills had sprung up outside of new towns where villagers had piled the debris that had once been their old towns before they were destroyed in the war. The last order Franz had followed was from Lieutenant Pirchan who asked him to visit his mother and sister in Graz to convey his good-byes. Franz had traveled to Graz immediately after the Americans released him and would never talk about that experience.

  Franz told Roedel that he wanted to build and fly airplanes. It was all he had ever wanted. Through friends at the Messerschmitt company, Franz had secured an offer to work on the proposed Canadian fighter called “the Aero.” The job was in “payload weight and balancing”—if the jet was approved for production by the Canadian government. Seeing Franz’s enthusiasm, Roedel encouraged him to take the leap and go to Canada. He warned Franz, “You’ll have to learn English, you know.” Franz told Roedel he was already practicing. Franz wished Roedel luck in trying to rejoin the Air Force, “if there ever is a German Air Force again.” The two parted with a silent handshake. After what they had seen together, words were inadequate.

  Franz found the experience of leaving his homeland easier than he had thought it would be. In Germany, the ghosts of the war were close to home. Whenever a plane flew overhead, Franz thought of his young pilots. He saw the suffering in the eyes of his countrymen. He also remembered how some of them had turned on him. In the forests and camps of Germany, Franz saw the ghosts of the Holocaust, the crimes of the minority that had spoiled every German fighting man’s honor. One German fighter pilot spoke for the fighter forces when he wrote, “The atrocities committed under the sign of the Swastika deserve the most severe punishment. The Allies ought to leave the criminals to the German fighting soldiers to bring to justice.”1

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, SPRING 1953, CANADA

  When Franz and Eva relocated to Canada they settled with Eva’s brother, who had moved to Vancouver, on the west coast, to work in the lumber industry. There, Franz waited to be called to work on the Aero. When the Canadian government approved the Aero for production that July, the military classified the jet as top secret. Franz lost his job before it began. When he applied for a security clearance, he was refused because he had been a German officer. Franz took the setback in stride. His brother-in-law helped him find a job at a logging camp in the Queen Charlotte Islands. There, Franz worked as a diesel mechanic, fixing logging trucks. He lived in the company of twenty-seven lumberjacks and their families. He quickly learned English and liked working with his hands and amid nature. He and Eva had a daughter named Jovita, but the couple’s relationship was not to last. Some would say that a good relationship requires “a sun and a moon,” and Franz and Eva were both suns—strong and stubborn. Their divorce, when it came in 1954, was amicable.

  Because the job paid well, Franz stayed on at the lumber camp after Eva had departed. The distant sight of the Canadian Rockies and their snowy peaks reminded him of the Bavarian Alps and the life he had once loved. He began to write home, at night, to his mother, the men he had served with, and the people he had known.

  On a whim, he wrote to Mr. Greisse, the kindly bureaucrat who had supervised pensions, whose address he had saved. But Mr. Greisse did not write back. Instead, his daughter, Hiya, did. She told Franz that her father was ill. Because he had been a member of The Party, the Soviets had locked him up in a camp at the war’s end. An average-sized man before the war, he came back to his daughter five years later weighing just ninety pounds. Hiya had been a short thirteen-year-old kid with strawberry-blond hair when she and Franz first met. Now she was twenty-three and eager to explore the world. She asked Franz questions about Canada. Franz wrote back. Despite the fifteen-year age gap between them, the two began to correspond.

  Hiya told Franz about her experiences after the war’s end, how she traded her mother’s china for food from local farmers. She wrote about the Soviet soldiers who had moved into her house, washing their potatoes in the toilets, shattering her mother’s crystal glasses, and getting drunk every night while singing “Lili Marlene.” “They were mostly nice, but boy if they got drunk you didn’t want to be around them as a girl,” she told Franz. Hiya confided that the Soviets had raped most of the women in and around Berlin in the year after the war. She would not talk about what happened to her sister.

  For the better part of two years, Franz and Hiya corresponded weekly. Every so often Franz called her from the only phone on the island, one located in the office of the lumberyard.

  In 1956, Hiya boarded a plane and
traveled to Vancouver, where she and Franz met for the first time in twelve years. Her blond hair curled above her ears and her posture was impeccable. She wore a sky-blue skirt and blouse with white buttons that led up to a high collar and tiny black gloves. Franz had come to know Hiya’s beautiful personality, but he never guessed that the short little girl would one day grow up to be so gorgeous. Their plan had been an unspoken one. Within a year of meeting they headed to the city hall in Vancouver and were married.

  Hiya enjoyed moving with Franz to his island in the Queen Charlottes, where they shared a small cabin. On their first night together on the island Franz led Hiya outside, to look at the sky just as they had during the war. He held her hand as he showed her the Aurora Borealis, the colorful Northern Lights. But when Hiya saw the lights flickering on the horizon, she cried hysterically. The Northern Lights had triggered flashbacks in her mind, memories of Potsdam and Berlin burning. With time, she came to appreciate the lights, but she never saw the same beauty in them that Franz did.

  Franz’s mother came to visit him and Hiya even though she was not thrilled about the idea of them having married in city hall instead of a church. She stayed for four months. When Franz would tell old fighter pilot jokes during their dinners together, his mother would always chide him. “Franz, you’re lucky Dad is not around!” Franz’s mother asked him to go to church with her and to attend confession. He did and confessed to a priest that he had not attended church for twenty years because he had been caught dueling. The priest laughed, welcomed Franz back, and said, “In that case, you’re overdue for communion.” Franz and Hiya tried to convince Franz’s mother to stay with them longer, but she refused. She missed her friends—but more than anything she missed her beer.